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Melbourne, One Heart Too Many? |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 04 March 2010 16:06 |
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There are no translations available.
Melbourne Heart FC is a soccer team that will begin competing in the A-League during the upcoming 2010/11 season, and, until recently, lacked a concrete name and identity. Soccer has a strange place within Australian sporting culture. In spite of the relative success of our national team at the last World Cup, and the increase in popularity with the introduction of the A-League in 2004, the world game has always been the bridesmaid to the brides of the other (more successful) Australian football codes. Melbourne, in particular, is a hard place for new team to succeed — with 9 out of 16 AFL teams, and highly successfully rugby and soccer teams — any new sports franchise that enters into such a saturated market has to hit the ground running.
With that in mind, the Melbourne Heart identity does a lot right. And a few things… less right. While we are often (rightly) quick to dismiss crowd sourcing as a blight upon the design industry, I think that when it comes to local sports teams we can make an exception — if anything is meant to represent a grass roots community, local teams are it. Local tabloid the Herald Sun ran a competition to name the new team. From four choices — Melbourne Heart FC, Sporting Melbourne FC, Melburnians, and Melbourne Revolution — shortlisted after the competition, Heart won. However, the name has been mired in opposition by two entities: First, the Australian Football League (AFL) which claimed that the only team capable of using the words “Australian,” “Football,” and “Club” was the city’s rugby team, Melbourne Football Club. The second came from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, which holds an annual “Heart of Melbourne Appeal” for the homeless. It remains to be seen whether this name and identity will stick around for long.
The logo itself, created by brand agency Elmwood, is bold and iconic, and offers a neat visual representation of the name. The colour is quite nice and the gradients actually work pretty well, although reproducing them on a kit could be difficult. The shield motif is appropriate, and references a long tradition of other soccer teams, while still managing to look contemporary. It seems that a large part of the design was focused around creating a rivalry with the other local club, Melbourne Victory — thus the choice of colour to imply a red vs. blue dynamic.
However, trying to integrate the shield and heart, while also avoiding heart-shaped visual clichés, has led to a slightly clunky solution — there’s none of that soccer elegance. The use of the large “M” to signify Melbourne is getting a little old, too. Surely there are better ways of representing our fine city? Additionally, the attempt to meld together “M” and “H” into a single form defined by counterspace doesn’t work — the H actually ends up being a pair of rugby goalposts. Not to mention the weird little dongle… thing. The choice of Gotham for the logotype seems very fashionable now, but I wonder, given the popularity of the typeface, how long it will remain that way.
The logo in press conference action. Way to work the red and white palette guys! Image source.
Overall, this is an identity that seeks to integrate itself firmly with the community as quickly as it can, and as far as football club identities go, this is far from the worst out there. But as an isolated piece, it doesn’t work as well as it could.
THANKS TO JO-RYAN SALAZAR FOR THE TIP.
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The Indianapolis Museum of Art Gets a Break |
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 26 February 2010 15:15 |
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There are no translations available.
Originally established in 1883, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is one of the largest, and oldest, museums in the United States, with more than 50,000 works of art in its collection housed in a 150-plus-acre area. Various components make up the IMA: There is the Lilly House and Gardens, a 26-acre historic estate and house museum; the 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, an art park that includes untamed woodlands, wetlands, meadows and a 35-acre lake; the Toby, a 558-seat theater for film, talks and performances; the Miller House, a mid-century residence designed by Eero Saarinen with interiors by Alexander Girard, located off campus in Columbus; and, finally, the Indianapolis Museum of Art itself, which renders the odd and redundant designation of “Indianapolis Museum of Art IMA.” Clearly, a large organization with a lot of related parts. And to make sense of all of them, IMA worked with Pentagram partner Abbott Miller — an Indiana native, for those looking for authenticity and street cred — to create a new identity.
Let’s talk first about the main museum lock-up that helps introduce the visual language that then permeates the rest of the entities. The most obvious thing that you will either love or hate is the aggressive cropping of the word “Indianopolis” by slicing the second “A” in half and splitting it into two lines. I happen to love this. First, it resolves the issue of such a long word throwing everything off. Second, it can serve as a reminder that this museum is located in Indianapolis, Indiana by isolating that first line. And lastly, well, I just think it looks cool and adds a certain edge to the museum. The lock-up with the IMA acronym is where things get a little unbalanced, and there is an unresolved relationship between the two elements and their colors, sizes and letter-spacing. After you see the chart of the whole program, below, come back to this and see if it makes any difference to you.
For better or for worse, I maintain a heavy load of work lodged in my brain and whenever I see something new, I inevitably sift through all that visual debris for references, and when I first looked at this logo it reminded me of the work Abbott Miller did for Architect magazine in 2006. And rightly so, since the type choice is the same, Taz by Lucas de Groot. It’s a fine choice for both instances, but I just had to mentally make the division between the two. Luckily, absoluelty none of the thousands of visitors to IMA will have the same problem I did.
When you see the relationship between all the elements is when you are able to grasp just how complicated this standardization exercises can really be, and how the whole is, if not more, just as important as the parts. The chart above also shows a quick view of what lock-ups work well small and which don’t and it also helps emphasize the need for a simple visual solution and in this case, the type choice has such an interesting personality that it helps tie everything together. Simply browsing through the IMA web site you get a sense of the identity design and it’s all achieved through these lock-ups and the deployment of Taz over and over. The overall effect of this identity gives the IMA a fresh and almost provocative personality that the old logo simply couldn’t. Ever.
THANKS TO GAUTAM RAO FOR THE TIP.
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